Patriot Hellfire PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive Review

Over the past year we’ve seen a new generation of solid state drives enter the market taking speeds and form factor to the next level. These are of course the PCI-Express M.2 NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) drives. These drives offer 3-4x the speeds of SATA-based solid state drives and are extremely small, plugging right into an M.2 slot in your motherboard. Patriot has presented us with their first ever PCI-Express M.2 solid state drive, the Hellfire. It is based off of Phison’s E7 NVMe controller and comes in 240GB and 480GB versions. Today we have the 480GB version which offers sequential read and write speeds of 3000 MB/s and 2400 MB/s respectively. Let’s see what this drive can do!

Packaging
The Hellfire comes in a simple blister pack. The front lets us know the capacity and that it is a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.2 M.2 solid state drive.

Flipping over to the back there are some features listed in a few different languages. On thing that is interesting is that the speeds are not listed on the packaging, and they are hard to find on Patriot’s website as well.

About 10 years of computer experience. Been messing around with electronics since I was 5, got into computers when I was in highschool, been modding them ever since then. Very interested in how things work and their design.